The Odyssey

I

You knew that I was a solitary person
Preferring the dark side of the moon
Or the underside of an unturned stone -
That my path to the future was a narrow one,
One that I would travel alone.

II

We spent our nights listening to Beethoven
Drinking cheap red wine by the gallon
Reading poetry by Byron and Donne
Never thinking it would someday end
We lived in an intellectual Eden
Until our little sanctuary was overrun
By protesters, assassins and political doctrine
By a decade full of chaos and madness.

By the end of the Sixties
We had switched from the classics
To Corso, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti
You went from cheap wine to cheap whisky
And spent mornings hung over and sick
I practiced Zen in a store front monastery
And lived out of a rucksack like Kerouac

III

You left for Chicago to attend university
And I joined the Navy and went out to sea
We sent occasional letters back and forth
Two, three years passed uneventfully
You told me you were happy translating Baudelaire -
I asked if you still braided your long hair
No, you had cut it short –

You plotted my Mediterranean ports of call:
Barcelona, Spain – Cannes, France - Rapallo, Italy
On a map you hung on your bedroom wall
You said it made your academic world seem small
To which I replied: No two worlds are of equal size:
To a snail it’s an inch wide - to a bird, it’s the entire sky
Do you recall Gulliver’s tale?
More often than not - it is we who are out of scale.

IV

More than four decades have passed since then –
And where there had once been a garden
There is only an overturned stone,
Its underside bleached white by the sun -

And as I turn my back and continue on
I Keep pace with time’s slow pendulum
Content with having chosen
The path less taken